Promotional kites are an ancient business, basically as old as
the
business of manufacturing inexpensive kites as toys for kids. I've seen
promotional diamond kites from Wilder Mfg. and Alox Mfg. that date back
to the Depression, and I suspect that Hi-Flier was making them back
then as well. By the 1950s, promo kites were a huge business for
Hi-Flier, and I had many of them when I was growing up in the 1960s.
(The one I remember best came from Cundiff's Sinclair over at Harlem
and Higgins in Chicago.) Promo kites mostly vanished with the American
manufacturers around 1990. What promo kites I've seen since then have
come (like most inexpensive toys) from China.

I pick up or send away for promo kites any time I can, to see
what sorts of things are being passed off as kites these days. It's no
wonder that kite flying among kids has gone into eclipse: Plastic
promo kites are almost always lousy kites, probably designed by people
who have never flown a kite and may never
have actually seen
one except in photographs.

Almost.

Flying the Giant

Back in the spring of 1987, during the few weeks that I spent
moving from Baltimore
to Scotts Valley, California to work at Borland, I was handed a bagged
plastic kite
by my 4-year-old nephew Brian, who asked me to put it together and fly
it
with him. His mother had sent away a couple of proof-of-purchase seals
(which I still call "boxtops") from frozen vegetables, and they had
received the kite from the Green Giant company. The kite that we found
in the bag was impressive enough to warrant a short article all by
itself. As a promo kite, it stands completely apart: No kite I have
ever gotten with a purchase or sent boxtops away for has ever worked
anywhere near as well.

The
kite is shown here, with Uncle Jeff, Brian at 4, and 2-year-old Matt
toward the right edge. (My bichon Mr. Byte is the white item on the
photo's lower edge.) At 48" high and 42" wide it dwarfed both boys.
Assembling it had been easy: Five tubular plastic sticks
plugged
into a central hub, and little plugs at the ends of the sticks had
blunt protrusions that fit into reinforced holes in the sail at the
five points of the kite. The top stick (making the upper point in the
five-sided kite) was 12" long. The two side sticks were each 21" long.
The two bottom sticks were 36" long. The sticks were actually in two
thicknesses:
The top three were 5/16" in diameter, and the two lower sticks (which
were the longest, at 36") were 3/8" in diameter. The long sticks
probably
needed the extra diameter for rigidity, but having the sticks in two
sizes meant that the kite was almost impossible to assemble
incorrectly. The sticks snapped into place easily and stayed put
without glue.

There was no bridle. The string tied to a loop at the
center of the plastic hub, which protruded through a hole in the center
of the kite's plastic sail. (See the closeup photo below.) Now, I've
flown bow kites with single-point
bridles, and while it can be done, they generally fly much more
reliably with the classic, two-point bridle. I remember being skeptical
while reading the instructions, which indicated that the kite needed
neither tail nor any bridle other than the string tied to the kite's
center point.

But we followed the instructions to finish the kite, attached
a roll of string that had been wound on a piece of scrap 1 X 1
lumber, and took it out into Grandma's back yard in Niles, Illinois. I
had my doubts about its stability, and biggish trees were all around,
so
Carol took the photo before we launched it. That way, we would be sure
to remember it if its lifetime proved to be measured in seconds, as
sometimes happens with kites. Brian is holding the string in
the
photo. There was a light breeze from the south; I would guess 5-8 MPH.
That's not a lot of wind for kites, but the Green Giant kite was
extremely light for a kite that large, and I suspected it would rise
without difficulty.

And
it did. With Brian holding tight to the roll of string, I took the kite
back about ten feet, lifted it up over my head, and just let go. It
didn't just rise; it zoomed.
I helped Brian let some string out, and in a minute or so the kite was
floating almost still on the wind, fifty feet over the church parking
lot that abutted Grandma's back yard. We took it out about 200 feet,
which was all the string we had, but the boys were delighted.
It danced back and forth a little as the wind shifted, and I was
poleaxed by how little it leaned to either side. It might have reacted
differently to a stronger wind, but in a light spring breeze it flew
almost perfectly. I showed Brian how to wind it back in, and in a
little while the Green Giant and Sprout were safely back on the grass.

The
kite remained in Grandma's basement, and I think the boys flew it on
their own a few years later. At some point the sail tore, and the
wounded kite sat in a corner of the basement until the summer of 2006,
when we cleaned out the house to be sold.
I salvaged the sticks and the center connector, thinking I might
re-cover it someday, but two of the sticks turned up missing before I
got them home. I never rebuilt it, but I still have the
center
connector, which I feel is the key to the kite's success. There is no
bow-string. The center connector (shown in the photo) has a 15°
dihedral angle, providing
the necessary "bow" that makes the kite stable. Precisely cut sticks
and sail plastic made for very good balance, and it still rates as one
of the
most stable kites I've ever flown, and that with no tail whatsoever!

The Secret Origin of the Green Giant Kites

It
was only recently that I determined where the Green Giant kites had
come from. According to a small logo molded into the center connector,
the kite was made by RB
Toy Development Company
of Mt. Prospect, Illinois, which (a little weirdly) is only a few miles
west
of Grandma's house where we flew the kite. I called the company, and
spoke at some
length with the current owner, Dennis Kupperman. RB had been founded by
his father Sam Kupperman in 1958, and has been in the advertising
premium business all that time. Sam is now retired and living in
Florida, but Dennis was most gracious, and he told me the whole story
of the Green Giant kites.

The Green Giant story is interesting in
itself. In 1928, the Minnesota Valley Canning Company created a green
giant figure as their trademark. It was not an appealing figure,
hunched and grumpy looking, and not even green. But
starting in the 1930s, a young advertising genius named Leo Burnett
gradually refined the giant into the cultural icon we know today. Early
TV representations didn't work well, because giants were generally the
heavies in storybook tales, and very small children found the giant
frightening. The Burnett agency grafted a little Santa Claus into him,
giving him an ever-present broad smile, calling him the Jolly Green Giant,
and even made him laugh with Santa's "ho ho ho." It worked, and the
Giant has endured even through multiple changes in ownership for the
canning company itself. The Giant even made it into a humorous hit song, "The Jolly Green Giant," which the Kingsmen of "Louie Louie" fame took to #4 on the Billboard charts in 1965.

In 1970, someone at Leo Burnett had the idea of putting the
Jolly Green
Giant on a kite as a sales premium. The idea was to offer a
distictinctive kite for 8 labels saved from Green Giant product cans or
cartons--or two labels and 75c. (By the mid-1980s, the price had risen
to 12 labels, or 6 labels plus $1.) They created a large kite with the
Giant as a design, and printed 20,000 of them, only to find (after the
kites were printed!) that the kite would not fly. At that point the
agency contacted RB Toy Development
Company, with whom they had worked before on sales premiums targeted at
children. Dennis Kupperman is an engineer, and while he was not trained
specifically in aerodynamics, he read what he could on kites, looked at
kites sold by Hi-Flier and other firms, and came up with his own
design.
It really was a giant kite, measuring 48" high by 42" wide. (Most
dime-store kites in that era were 36" high at best.) Dennis and Sam
were granted US design patent #225653 on the center
connector and general kite configuration.
Dennis related how he had demonstrated the kite to Leo Burnett in
downtown Chicago on Michigan avenue, in the shadow of the Prudential
Building where Burnett's corporate offices were located. The agency
loved it, and
soon delivered the artwork for the first run.

The Burnett
graphics showed the Giant in full, standing feet together with
outstretched arms. It was a good design, recognizable as a human figure
when the kite was a long way out. The only problem was that once the
kite was up a little ways and flying in bright light, the green color
washed out and the Giant figure looked a lot like the crucified Jesus.
A few church groups complained, and the Burnett Agency responded as the
class act that they were, by recalling and destroying all kites that
were waiting to be shipped, and eating the full cost of the error. They
redesigned
the graphics with the Giant in a pose that could not be confused with
Jesus nor anyone else, and the kites went into production again.

This
time there were no hangups: The kites flew like banshees, and the Green
Giant
design was a huge
hit. Between 1971 and 1990, the Green Giant Company
fielded numerous kite promotions under several different designs, with
the Giant alone or with Sprout, his diminutive sidekick, introduced by
the
Burnett Agency in 1973. One premium package included a small Sprout
figure
hanging from a parachute, which could be set on the string and blown by
the wind up to the kite, at which time a sharp tug on the string would
(usually) launch the Sprout on a parachute ride back to Earth. Dennis
related a story of taking a Green Giant kite out to a park in Skokie
with a bag full of rolls of kite string, and sending the kite out on
one roll of string after another, until the kite was 3,000 feet away
and invisible except in binoculars. Even winding the kite in on a
Hi-Flier Spinwinder was a lot of work, and at some point Dennis just
broke the string, figuring that someone, somewhere would find the kite
and adopt it.

RB has made kites as premiums for many
other companies and products (including Coke, Red Baron Pizza, and Kool
Aid) but in honor of the Giant's being the first (and, after all,
being
a giant)
all of RB's other kites have been three inches shorter and three inches
narrower. All of the Green Giant kites are now collectibles, and Dennis
has
gotten very
good prices for the few he has sold out of leftover inventory.

When
I asked Dennis about the prospects for more RB kites, whether of the
Green Giant design or any other, he told me what I pretty much
expected: That cost-squeezed companies are rarely willing to commit the
sort of money that it takes to do ambitious premium promotions anymore,
and that kites generally are not seen as the big draw that they were
twenty or thirty years ago. Creating the rubber printing plates alone
costs $10,000 - $15,000 each, and the large drum presses used to print
the kite designs on plastics are now being retired in favor of smaller
presses that won't print anything as large as the Giant. Injection
molding the center connector cannot be done in small batches, so runs
of less than 25,000 are not economically feasible. Getting kites into
retail stores might be possible, but Dennis doesn't want to be in that
business (retail distribution can be ugly and expensive--as I know from
my years in book publishing) and he isn't sure that the kite market is
big enough these days to make low-cost plastic kites profitable. That
said, he's still got everything he needs to assemble the 45"
kites
(assuming the plastic sails can be printed somewhere) so if you have
the money and a way to distribute them, he'd like to hear from you.

Alas,
he can only sell Green Giant kites to the Giant's parent company, and
that sort of big-time premium campaign has passed into history. So if
you've got a Green Giant kite, promote it to wall art, because if it
goes into the trees you won't be getting another one any time soon. I
see them every so often on eBay and they're worth watching for, though
you probably won't get them for $10. I'm hanging onto the center
connector that I have, and may rebuild it with wooden dowels and a
cloth sail at some point. The general design of a barn-door kite with a
bow is a good one, and an example (called a "flat-nose bow kite") can
be found in Marion Downer's classic book Kites: How to Make and Fly Them.
It might be possible to make a dihedral center connector for a similar
kite out of a sheet of aluminum, but in general it's a bad idea to have
metal parts in kites. Ben Franklin was many things, but most of all he
was...lucky.

What Came in the Bag

The RB Green Giant kites were packed in a 4" X 37" shipping bag,
which was brown paper early on and clear plastic in later years. The
shipping label was the coupon that the buyer sent in with his or her
name and address. The kite was printed on a single sheet of vinyl 41
1/2" X 48 1/2". The kite sail itself was clearly outlined with dotted
lines so kids could
cut it out of the sheet accurately. Detailed instructions (and in my
view as a
long-time writer and tech editor) very good ones were printed in the
corners of the sheet. See below for a 1972 kite as it came out of the
package.

In the upper right corner of the sheet is a cut-out coupon for
ordering another Green Giant kite, requiring two proof-of-purchase
labels and (remember, this was 1972) 75c.

The plastic sticks were of three different lengths and two different diameters:

1 short stick, 12 1/2" long and 5/16" in diameter

3 medium sticks, 19 3/4" long and 5/16" in diameter

2 long sticks, 35 5/8" diameter and 3/8" in diameter

This sounds needlessly complex, but there was a method to it: RB
made it virtually impossible to assemble the sticks into the center
connector incorrectly.

The center connector was injection molded, and came with five
stick-plugs attached via flashing, very much like the parts in a model
airplane kit:

The final item was a little sheet of five pressure-sensitive
adhesive tabs to be used at the kite's five corners to reinforce the
holes through which the stick caps passed. The kite I show here came
with an opened bag, and the tabs were not present. When I assembled the
kite, I put two folded-back lengths of clear packing tape over each
vertex, and then cut the small hole at the center of the tape tabs with
an X-Acto knife.

Keep in mind that the kite is now 40 years old (as of 2012) and it's
not intended to be flown. I don't know if the force of the sail at its
vertices will tear the plastic. I've had a couple of "classic" kites
self-destruct on me over the years when I attempted to fly them, so
with a kite that cost me $40 I'm going to be careful.

Green Giant Kites After the RB Toy Era

One
thing to keep in mind is that not all Green Giant kites followed
the well-known RB Toy design described above. I have a diamond kite
specimen measuring 60" X 48", making it even larger than the RB kites.
It's undated, but by the art design of
the Giant printed on it, I'm quite sure it's post-1990. The kite flies
quite well on only a little wind, though the sticks are thin and I get
the impression the kite would die quickly if the wind got too strong,
or if it hit anything. 6' of tassel-tail made it very stable. Most of
the Green Giant kites you find on eBay these days are this design.

In 2012 I gave my nephew Brian one of the kites shown above, and he
and his fiancee Alexis flew it on a Lake Michigan beach with great
success. The photo below is for scale. LR: Alexis, a very
big kite, Brian, and Aunt Carol. Brian is the four-year-old boy in the
picture with the RB kite that we flew in Grandma's back yard in 1987.
He's now thirty, and the occasion was his graduation from the
University of Chicago with his MBA. Kites make great gifts--even to boys who are now taller than their uncles!

I've also seen
a few late-issue Green
Giant promo kites on eBay that are of a "square diamond" or "Malay"
design. Although I've never had a Green Giant specimen of that design
myself, I have flown similar promo kites from other firms. The square
diamond design is fairly small, cheaply made, and takes some skill to
fly. Don't assume that every Green
Giant kite you see for sale is an RB Toy specimen!

Ho Ho Ho!

That's the story of the RB Toy Green Giant promo kites and the
man who created them. Conventional wisdom assumes that "boxtop" premium
offers provide
only the cheapest and lousiest goods, but in this one case,
conventional
wisdom got spanked and sent home without supper. The RB Green Giant
was an amazing kite, and if all promo kites assembled this easily and
flew this well, there might still be a promo kite industry--and kids
might still be flying kites like they did in the 1960s.